09/11/2021 10:51
Clarín.com
World
Updated 9/11/2021 10:51
Twenty years later, the gloomy haze of dust and smoke that enveloped the towers collapsed in the attacks of September 11, 2001 has not yet cleared.
A multitude of questions and doubts still surround that extraordinary attack that modified world history and cut the individual liberties of Americans like never before behind an unfinished and ungraspable war against the terrorist enemy.
That day, two decades ago, the Twin Towers of New York, temples of modern capitalism, were hit by two 747 planes loaded with passengers. The fire consumed them and in a few hours they collapsed creating a shocking world scene. "In a few seconds, we lost our balance," wrote Jean Daniel, the director of Le Nouvel Observateur, prophetically synthesizing the forces that this episode would eventually release. The attacks left more than 3,000 fatalities.
There were aftershocks in Washington where a third plane - there is a controversy based on the narrowness of the impact site and no wing tracks - that struck a section of the Pentagon.
And a fourth, which would have been shot down by the Air Force on its way to the White House.
A total of 19 suicide bombers, the vast majority of them Saudi nationals, participated in the operation.
The world became fully aware in that terrible moment of the existence of a terrorist network, Al Qaeda (The Base), commanded by a strange Saudi man with a long beard and a grim look, Osama Bin Laden, a refugee in Afghanistan and a member of a wealthy family head from an engineering and petroleum consortium with strong ties to the US.
Bin Laden with his group had fought the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, a task during which, in the middle of the Cold War, he received formidable US aid.
After the fall of the USSR, this flamboyant black sheep of his family clan sought to overthrow the Saudi crown, an ally of Washington.
The day the Twin Towers fell.
The attacks of September 11, 2001 Photo by Cezaro De Luca
To that end, he attacked American targets and spread his web of fear.
For the newly arrived government of George W. Bush, there was no doubt that Osama was the author of the 9/11 attacks, although it was never clear how he could organize them from the extreme precariousness of his exile in a quasi-medieval region like Afghanistan.
Those limitations sparked suspicions that, due to its sophistication, there may have been a country behind those attacks.
Relatives of those killed on that day have targeted Saudi Arabia.
Now they have succeeded in getting President Joe Biden to agree to declassify intelligence documents that they assume would prove Riyadh's involvement.
There is no certainty about these assumptions except for some loose and curious data that would not explain the alleged reasons either.
This year, for example, an FBI paper that listed a former Saudi embassy official, Mussaed Ahmed al Jarrah, emerged as suspected of having assisted the al Qaeda cell.
And of other Saudis who would have given shelter to the terrorists in Los Angeles.
In that word appears an alleged agent, Omar al-Bayoumu, who would have provided financial assistance to the attackers. The persistent version also flies overhead that the command chief, the Egyptian Mohammad Atta, had ties to Western intelligence services. In a book edited last year by the American journalist Daniel Hopsicker, "Welcome to Terrorland", Atta is described with testimonies from those who knew him as anything but a faithful Muslim, a sexual psychotic, alcoholic, fond of cocaine and life. night of the night clubs.
The 9/11 anniversary of last year, it was dispatched with the news that a judge, Sarah Netburn, ordered that two members of the Saudi royals testify about the attacks.
One of them is Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a former Saudi Arabian intelligence chief who was ambassador to the US from 1983 to 2005.
At the time of the tragedy, Afghanistan was in the hands of the Taliban, an ultra-Islamic and brutal satrapy that took power after the departure of the Soviets in a retreat as tragic and tumultuous as the one the Americans have just experienced.
At that time, Washington demanded the surrender of Bin Laden.
Faced with the refusal of its top leader, Mullah Omar, the US a month after 9/11, easily invaded that poor border. Thus began the most extensive war in American history that has just ended with the pathetic return of power to these despots. That mission did not achieve the objective that Bush sought. The Mullah escaped on a modest scooter to Pakistan, the CIA admitted, and Osama vanished without a trace.
This outcome multiplied the assumption that the leader of Al Qaeda could have died in the confusion of those days.
That is why doubts piled up about the veracity of his frequent statements and even footage in which he was seen with another height, with other clothes or heard with another voice.
Finally, a decade later, in the government of Barack Obama, the terrorist leader was executed by an American commando in the ostensible residence that he occupied next to the main door of a huge Pakistani military barracks.
Osama Bin Laden, the terrorist leader
He lived there under the supposed protection of the intelligence services of that country.
It was never clear why he was not arrested for trial as he was unarmed at the time of the raid.
Nor why his corpse was thrown into the ocean.
The attacks were a hinge in planetary history.
But its effects were measured in various dimensions.
The offensive against terrorism was a strategy of defense of the power and the birth of a new doctrine of "preventive war" raised by Bush that same year at the West Point academy.
He argued that the US could advance militarily on any objective if it assumed that today or tomorrow it could constitute a threat.
Internally, the attack motorized the creation of Homeland Security, the US Ministry of National Security, a structure with permission for all kinds of espionage on Americans.
Also about those who did not connect with the patriotic fervor of the hour and that the wife of Vice President Dick Cheney placed on an extensive blacklist.
That advance on individual freedoms was combined with the ideas of the Minister of Justice, Alberto González, the highest Hispanic in the US hierarchy, who ignored the Geneva convention by accepting torture as a method of interrogation.
Prison camps like Guantánamo in Cuba and other more clandestine camps where they took suspects to force them to confess like those that this journalist observed during the civil war in Libya, which the dictator Muhammad Khadafi set up for his British and North American allies.
The famous Zbigniew Brezinski, a former national security adviser, in 2007 described that scenario in harsh words. “The vagueness of the phrase 'war on terror' was deliberately calculated. The constant reference to the war on terror achieved a higher objective, stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear clouds reason and intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize people in support of the policies they want to implement ”.
It is interesting that in this space, in which the government had a free hand, progress was made in an unprecedented demolition of regulations in the markets.
This process was reflected just two months after the attacks in the largest bankruptcy in the history of capitalism with a trail of scammed by the fraudulent bankruptcy of the energy company Enron, an ally of the Republican ruling party.
For Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, that bankruptcy marked "such a decisive moment for the business world and American society as were the 9/11 attacks."
But, the following year an even greater bankruptcy ensued, that of the huge telecommunications firm WorldCom, also due to the falsification of data on the Stock Exchange.
They were the threshold of the 2008 junk mortgage crisis that Bush left as a legacy to his country and the world.
Former President George W. Bushg.
EFE
In the international arena, neoconservatives who clung to the Republican's disconcerting management abused the confusing notion of the war on terror to seek to reshape the Middle East and make the US a physical part of that universe.
They were based on notions like those of Samuel Huntington who argued that, after the fall of the communist camp, the world would suffer other types of cultural confrontations.
Islam was the most ominous of these enemies.
Those visions were behind the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a country ruled by despot Saddam Hussein that had been a key US ally against Iran and had nothing to do with 9/11.
The unknown about that unusual invasion was cleared years later. General Wesley Clark, former commander of the NATO forces in the bombings of the former Yugoslavia, made a revelation in 2007 with special relevance on this anniversary and in light of the collapse of the adventure in Afghanistan. Clark, now retired, visited the Pentagon after 9/11. One of his former subordinates commented: "Sir, we are going to take Iraq."
Clark looked at him in surprise.
The other soldier handed him a classified document from the then Defense Minister Donald Rumsfeld.
There he described the takeover of seven countries in the next five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finally Iran.
The initiative, a failed geopolitical madness, turned the US into a land carrier in a strategic and oil-rich region, one of the central purposes of that White House, as former Bush adviser Richard Perle later admitted.
Twenty years after 9/11, when fear takes other forms, many obscurities are still entangled in this story.
Perhaps for this very reason, the worst tragedy is that terrorism is still there, that the Taliban dominate again or that Al Qaeda is once again threatening.
And that everything can be repeated twenty years later.